Analysis of moisture transport between connected enclosures under a forced thermal gradient

Nowadays, many electronic products are exposed to harsh climatic conditions, and hence the protection of these devices is a crucial factor in design of systems. Therefore, the modelling tools have become very useful in the electronics design which supports the search of optimal electronics design and humidity control solutions. While high fidelity CFD codes are too time consuming due to computational effort/time, the well-known Resistor-Capacitor (RC) approach has much lower calculation time and is more efficient to use in enclosures without too complex geometry in their interior. Thus, the objective of this paper is to build an in-house code based on the RC approach for simulating coupled heat and mass transport. The developed code is used for simulating moisture transport between two boxes/enclosures having different temperatures, connected with a tube of known geometry. It has also the capability of combining a 1D description and lumped components. Here, a FVM discretization of the heat conduction equation and Fick's second law for 1D description is applied to model heat and mass transport. The intention is to predict the amount of moisture transported only via diffusion (convection is neglected in this study) through the tube from the warm to the cold region.